In 2012, nearly two dozen Secret Service agents and members of the military lost their jobs or were severely reprimanded following a prostitution scandal in Columbia. Since then officials in the Obama administration had strenuously denied anyone in the administration was involved.
Now it has been reported that a White House volunteer, Jonathan Dach may have been involved but it’s still unclear if this is the case. Dach, at the time of the scandal was a Yale Law student, and has repeatedly denied any wrong doing, and now works full time as policy advisor on Global Women issues at the State Department.
The Washington Post reported Dach’s father, Leslie Dach, is a prominent Democratic donor who gave $23,900 to the party in 2008 to help elect Obama. In his previous job as a top lobbyist for Wal-Mart, he partnered with the White House on high-profile projects, including Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move!” campaign.
He, too, joined the Obama administration this year. In July, he was named a senior counselor with the Department of Health and Human Services, where part of his responsibilities include handling the next phase of the Affordable Care Act.
The Post reported new details drawn from government documents and interviews show that senior White House aides were given information at the time suggesting that a prostitute was an overnight guest in the hotel room of a presidential advance-team member — yet that information was never thoroughly investigated or publicly acknowledged.
The president commented at the time regarding the agents involved, “a couple of knuckleheads” and mentioned to reporters this would be “no different than what I expect out of my delegation that’s sitting here.”
“We’re representing the people of the United States,” he said, “and when we travel to another country I expect us to observe the highest standards, because we’re not just representing ourselves.”
The Post continued to report the Secret Service shared its findings twice in the weeks after the scandal with top White House officials, including then-White House Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler. Each time, she and other presidential aides conducted an interview with the advance-team member and concluded that he had done nothing wrong.
After the scandal broke the Secret Service provided evidence of Dach potential involvement in the prostitution scandal in Columbia; a question now arises why this wasn’t followed up on.
In a separate investigation conducted by the inspector general’s office of the Department of Homeland Security —at the beset of Senate committee to thoroughly investigate the misconduct found additional evidence from records and witnesses who accompanied the team in Colombia.
The Post continued to report the lead investigator later told Senate staffers that he felt pressure from his superiors in the office of Charles K. Edwards, who was then the acting inspector general, to withhold evidence — and that, in the heat of an election year, decisions were being made with political considerations in mind.
The Post continued to report, We were directed at the time . . . to delay the report of the investigation until after the 2012 election,” David Nieland, the lead investigator on the Colombia case for the DHS inspector general’s office, told Senate staffers, according to three people with knowledge of his statement.
Nieland added that his superiors told him “to withhold and alter certain information in the report of investigation because it was potentially embarrassing to the administration.”
The question which needs to be addressed if Secret Service agents were investigated and many of them were either fired but by this report why did the White House not fully investigate one of their own for gross misconduct?
If nothing inappropriate happened then let’s have a full transparency of the investigation from all who investigated the prostitution scandal.
One only has to look at past scandals the White House has been involved in with the administration repeatedly stated it’s either old news or was slow in releasing documents.
Let’s have a full accounting on what happened.
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